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Keri Phillips: Hello, and welcome to Rear Vision, I'm Keri Phillips. Today we're going back to the break-up of the USSR.

Journalist [archival]: As the Soviet Union continues to disintegrate, the republics of Russia and Kazakhstan have reached agreement on maintaining existing borders.

Journalist [archival]: The events of the past week have moved so fast that Estonia, the smallest of the Soviet republics, has begun negotiations to join the European community.

Keri Phillips: In December 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated and 15 countries emerged from what had been a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from Moscow. Recently we've heard a lot about one of those post-Soviet republics—Ukraine—but Ukraine is just one of 14 such states (excluding Russia), which attract varying degrees of interest and influence from Moscow.

Today on Rear Vision we'll have a look at what's happened to those states and their relationship with Russia and the West since 1991. Geography plays a big part in the story and you'll find a useful interactive map on the Rear Vision website: abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision, or just Google 'Rear Vision'.

The three tiny Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—were only part of the USSR from the 1940s, and since declaring their independence they've become members of the EU and NATO, the military alliance established after the Second World War to counter Soviet power.

Lilia Shevtsova chairs the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Lilia Shevtsova: Well, they both…Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, they have different history. They have still genetic memory of freedom, of pluralistic society, to some extent a rule of law society because, well, they were occupied by the Soviet Union only in the early prewar periods, and of course what happened after the Soviet Union had dissolved in fact, well, they have succeeded to consolidate around the idea of a national independence and the idea of moving towards Europe. They have national elites, they have intellectuals, and they succeeded to move towards Europe pretty fast. And so they succeeded to drive away and to escape the ship.

Keri Phillips: Professor Alexander Cooley's most recent book is Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia.

Alexander Cooley: Well, the Baltic states were always the most nationalistic and the most anti-Soviet in terms of their orientation, even during Soviet times. And so when the Soviet Union collapsed, they were the quickest to declare independence. And, as you mentioned, they made Western integration an absolute priority.

What you have in these places are small populations, but more importantly in Latvia and Estonia you have quite large Russian-speaking ethnic minorities. And so handling the issue of the status of their citizenship has proven to be quite tricky and quite difficult. There are citizenship laws in place in both countries that deny citizenship to Russian speakers. And so they are on so-called grey passports. This is why you hear the Kremlin in Moscow make comments about the plight of Russian citizens or Russian ethnics in the Balts.

So they've been through quite a bit. They are members now of Europe, they regard themselves as part of the West. They do have this minority issue. And I think one of the consequences of the Crimea crisis is that you're going to see now NATO recommit itself to the territorial integrity of the Balts.

Keri Phillips: South of the Baltic states and lying in between Russia and the rest of Europe are Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, Europe's poorest nation. Belarus enjoys a close relationship with Russia and has benefitted economically from cheap supplies of Russian energy. Moldova's relationship with Russia is complicated by Transnistria, a breakaway region where the population is divided roughly into thirds—Moldovan, Russian, Ukrainian—and where the presence of Russian troops can be considered to give Russia effective authority.

Lilia Shevtsova: Bielorussia became an authoritarian state, totally dependent on Russia and subsidised from the Russian budget. Moldova is still in limbo. Moldova is drifting in the grey zone, but apparently Moldova has a chance to sign the association agreement with Brussels, and has a chance to join the European Union in some maybe indefinite future. But at the same time Moldova has a problem, it has Transnistria republic which is unrecognised but where Russians still keep Russian troops and have the military base. And that means that Moldova is still a very vulnerable state.

And of course Ukraine…and you know Ukraine…Ukraine, a dramatic drive for dignity, and a whole history of Ukrainian developments recently that made Ukraine a kind of battlefield between the liberal democracy and Russia.

Journalist [archival]: As the Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev ekes out his last days in office as president of a nation which no longer exists, the outcome of the break-up of the Soviet Union which many fear— civil war­—appears to be a reality in the Republic of Georgia.

Journalist [archival]: The sound of a pitched battle still underway around the Parliament buildings in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. Inside the building the autocratic and erratic president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, is trapped by rebel units of the Georgian guard intent on forcing him out of office.

Keri Phillips: Heading south-east now, we come to the South Caucuses—Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia's dispute with Russia over its breakaway regions—South Ossetia and Abkhazia—was effectively settled militarily by a short war in 2008, and Russian forces remain in both areas. Edward Walker from the University of California is the author of Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union.

Edward Walker: What's interesting about Georgia was a country that was widely considered to have the highest quality of life and standard of living among the union republics in the Soviet period, in the late Soviet period, you know, well-educated, sophisticated people who were commercially adept and so forth. And yet it had a particularly horrible post-Soviet experience, largely explained by the fact there was so much internal violence in Georgia, wars in effect with these breakaway regions of South Ossetia and particularly in Abkhazia. But there was also a civil war among Georgians that was very devastating. And when I first went to Georgia was in 1995 and it was really in the…it was just an abject economic and political state at that time.

And then you had this Rose Revolution that brought in this pro-Western but also rather volatile leader, Mikheil Saakashvili. My take on Saakashvili is that he was not very wise in his handling of Russia, I think that's safe to say, and helped precipitate that 2008 war. But substantially improved governance inside Georgia. You know, in some ways Georgia is the poster boy for a country that has managed, despite all expectations, to actually significantly reduce corruption, even after it became very endemic.

Keri Phillips: Armenia and Azerbaijan have a long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region recognised by the UN as part of Azerbaijan but where the population is 95% Armenian.

Edward Walker: Armenia was also a country that was perceived as having a relatively high standard of living in the Soviet period and also a very high level of human capital and a very educated population and so forth, and it also had the advantage of a large and fairly wealthy diaspora in the West. But its economy has done quite poorly, and it also does poorly on democracy scores and it gets very high ratings for corruption and so forth. And that's a difficult thing to explain, but certainly part of the explanation I think is the extent to which Armenia is geographically isolated. It had this war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and that contributed to what would have been very tense relations with Turkey anyway, but contributed to basically a complete ending of diplomatic relations and a closing of that border.

So Azerbaijan is a very peculiar country, in my view. It's very wealthy, completely as a result of…or almost entirely as a result of its oil and gas reserves. And it's a very poor democracy, extremely high corruption, and one where there is a strange cult of personality about the current leader and in particular his father, Heydar Aliyev. Baku, the capital, has gone through a real transformation physically. It looks great I think, lots of new buildings, cool architecture, very well-known architects doing very interesting buildings, and they've restored a lot of the old city, which is beautiful. But at the same time it's a place that feels like a corrupt oil state, almost a sort of paradigm of it.

Keri Phillips: Going further east, we find the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

Journalist [archival]: From Genghis Khan to Stalin, warlords and conquerors have marched through Turkistan with their armies.

Journalist [archival]: In the central Asian republic of Tajikistan, young Muslim hotheads are rampaging through the streets, burning buildings, looting shops and, according to some reports, beating and raping young Tajik girls for failing to wear traditional scarves or for having short hair.

Journalist [archival]: The new Kyrgyz leadership is appealing to the demonstrators who helped it seize control of government to stop their protest.

Journalist [archival]: Uzbekistan has discovered oil. Uzbekistan, in the heart of Central Asia, is now on the road to becoming one of the richest nations in the region.

Edward Walker: Kazakhstan is the northernmost country, it's the largest geographically. Its population is not as large as Uzbekistan's, but it's a huge country territorially. It borders on Russia, has a large Russian population in its northern regions. It has lots of oil and gas, and Kazakhstan is somewhat less corrupt, somewhat less autocratic than Azerbaijan. Its GDP per capita is also relatively high, so $13,000 per capita, and that contrasts with the country that is the poorest which is Tajikistan; the GDP per capita there is only $2,000 per capita. Tajikistan in part has suffered from its location, you know, next to Afghanistan. It has difficult trade access to China because of the huge mountains to its east and south.

Then Turkmenistan is another curious case. It has huge amounts of gas reserves in particular but also oil. It has been extremely autocratic. It's almost a kind of North Korea quality autocracy. Not quite, but there's an extreme personality cult under its first leader, Türkmenbaşy. It's a place where there is gigantomania. So there's these huge buildings that get built and extreme inequalities with large parts of the country still living in rural poverty.

Kyrgyzstan is an interesting case. It's less autocratic, let's put it that way, relative to its neighbours. There was a lot of hope for it initially because it had a fairly liberal Western-oriented leader initially, but he lost power, and I'm sure in no small part because the economy has been just in terrible shape. And I think a lot of that has to do with Kyrgyzstan's location; very isolated, it's very mountainous, and it has no real natural resources to speak of.

Then Uzbekistan is the largest country in Central Asia, it's the most important one, the largest population. It has had a powerful autocrat in power since the end of the Soviet period, like Kazakhstan. And it doesn't have the same amount of natural gas and oil reserves and economic potential as Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan, but it's the most important country in Central Asia in the sense that it's the one with the largest population and it's the one that has the historical vision of itself as being the rightfully dominant country of Central Asia politically and economically and militarily.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision on RN, online, on mobile and by podcast. I'm Keri Phillips, today exploring the other post-Soviet republics in the context of events in Ukraine. The issue of minorities in these former Soviet republics—Russian populations as well as groups of people who didn't identify with the dominant population—has been one of the major complications in their relationship with the Kremlin.

Alexander Cooley: There are two Soviet legacies that are important across the region. One of them, as you rightly flagged, was this issue of sizeable Russian minorities in both Estonia and in Latvia. The so-called Transnistria part of Moldova, the frozen part, is comprised of Russian-speakers that don't want to be part of an independent Moldova and have voted for greater integration into Russia.

And then you also had communities in Georgia in these breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that didn't want to be part of an independent Georgian state. Add to this large-scale Russian minorities in northern Kazakhstan, and in urban areas of Central Asia the Russian-speaking population tended to be more educated, professional, white collar elite. A lot of them have migrated back to Russia but some are still there, and that's the landscape of Russian speakers.

The second issue is the status of Russian military forces in these now independent states. So in Crimea you had both; the Russian population there, plus you had the largest Russian military facility outside of the Russian Federation at Sevastopol. So you also have major Russian military bases in Tajikistan. In its capital city actually, Dushanbe, you have 5,000 Russian troops there. You have a Russian airbase in Kurdistan, you have Russian troops in Moldova, in Transnistria, you have Russian troops now stationed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and you have a big Russian base in Armenia too.

So part of the concern of the fallout with Crimea is not only the justification or the use of Russian speakers as a pretext for intervention, it's the actual possible use of Russian bases and facilities to interfere in the domestic affairs of a lot of these countries that these governments are concerned about.

Keri Phillips: After the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine formed a new federation, the Commonwealth of Independent States. The leaders of eight additional former Soviet Republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—also signed up that month, bringing the number of participating countries to 11. The Baltic states never joined and Georgia joined later and then withdrew.

In 2011, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed a new agreement to work toward the establishment of a Eurasian Economic Union, modelled on the EU.

Lilia Shevtsova: Well, ironically the whole idea of a Eurasian Union was the idea of the Kazak president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. And it was his pet idea during the '90s. And suddenly Putin revived, re-energised this idea two years ago and it became his pet project. Why? Well, my explanation is that he started to think about the key idea of his new presidency, and he started to think about some kind of re-creation…not a new Soviet Union because he is pragmatic enough, he understands that to restore the Soviet Union is absolutely impossible, maybe it's a crazy idea, but some new entity as a new galaxy around Russia, Russia as a pole in the centre, and then dependent nations on Russia's orbit. This became his idea.

And in fact the Eurasian idea is coming back to the early 20th century, this was the favourite idea of Russian nationalists. They wanted to counterbalance Western influence and create a kind of philosophy of Eurasia as some civilisation which is hostile to the West, and at the same time is not the East but probably some kind of unique civilisation in the space that covers both Russia and Siberia and the Far East.

So Putin adopted this idea, and now he has tried on the basis of the Customs Union that includes Russia, Bielorussia, Kazakhstan and very soon Armenia. He wants to create a new political alliance with above-nation structures, with leadership in the Kremlin, and apparently as a kind of counterbalance to the European Union.

But ironically…this is the bitter irony about that, that other states, including Kazakhstan, Bielorussia, Armenia, they are ready to participate in this Eurasian Union only on their terms, if they get financial assistance, and all other assistance from Russia. For instance, now in order to keep Bielorussia on the orbit, Moscow has to subsidise it and give Bielorussia $2 billion annually. And Armenia is also anticipating Russia to help Armenia substantially to survive without much developed industry. And Kazakhstan being a member of the Eurasian Union, is also at the moment losing and not prospering because Kazakhstan has to agree to import Russian goods instead of Chinese goods, and Russian goods are much more expensive than Chinese goods. So at the moment only the Bielorussians are I would say getting some dividends out of this Eurasian Union, and Russia has to pay for loyalty.

Keri Phillips: Since the end of the Cold War, the West, through the European Union and NATO, has set up programs to engage with the former Soviet republics. One of the EU programs is the Eastern Partnership, a forum involving the EU, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Alexander Cooley: They would be put on a special footing, and depending upon the progress that they wanted to make with the EU and in their ties they would be offered free trade agreement, possible visa waiver facilitation, expansion in foreign aid, and these kinds of goodies.

So when the EU adopted this Eastern Partnership initiative, Moscow reacted quite negatively, because it saw it as a direct geopolitical confrontation and threat. Certainly there were people in the EU that viewed it that way, but some of them didn't, they just saw this as one of many vectors that these particular countries could pursue.

So Moldova, you referred to, certainly wanted this partnership. And the other country that is very enthusiastic about the partnership is Georgia, which has tried to develop closer ties with the West ever since 2003 and the so-called Rose Revolution. But I don't think that Brussels was really prepared for the intensity of objection on the part of Moscow, nor did most I think find themselves to be in this tug-of-war when it came to the Ukraine and its future orientation.

Keri Phillips: NATO also had a similar program, didn't it, called Partnership for Peace, or it still has it, that was aimed at creating trust between NATO and the states in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Does that operate in the same kind of way generally as you've just described the EU and its program?

Alexander Cooley: Yes, very much so. So like the EU, NATO has various tiers of membership and association. In the 1990s and 2000s they also adopted a sort of membership action program that also contained conditions, much like the EU was saying, okay, if you want to join NATO you need to be a democracy, you need to have a certain proportion of your GDP spent on defence, you need to be interoperable with other NATO military members, you need to have civilian control over the military, reform all your defence industries, and if you meet these conditions then you can join NATO. And so this process integrated the Baltic states and some of the other surrounding states in the Balkans and so forth.

What really set off the Russians was the discussion of NATO expanding even further eastward beyond Bulgaria and Romania, both on the Black Sea, that were taken as NATO members in the late 2000s, expanding even further eastward to Ukraine and Georgia. And this was on the agenda in 2008. The Georgians desperately wanted to…and of course there were internal divisions within the alliance saying, no, if we do this and this is really going to antagonise Russia. Besides, Georgia already has frozen conflicts and we don't want to embroil NATO there.

So in 2008 at the Bucharest NATO Summit we have one of the famous historical declarations of the post-Cold War time where, in this attempt to craft a compromise and give Georgia and Ukraine something, the compromise language is 'although we don't offer a MAP program today, Ukraine and Georgia will inevitably become NATO members'. And this really lit a fire under Putin in Moscow because he said, aha, you see, this has nothing to do with conditions and creating a security community and so forth, this is purely an exercise in geopolitical expansion in power, this declaration that somehow Georgia and Ukraine will be NATO members. And for Russia these two countries in particular were real lines in the sand.

Keri Phillips: Given what you've just said about the EU and NATO and the relationship between those two organisations and these former Soviet states, is it an unreasonable reaction by Moscow to see this as interference right in its backyard?

Alexander Cooley: I don't think it's unreasonable to regard it as interference if your world view is one of a zero-sum game. I think one of the most revealing speeches Putin has had was in an initial presser over events in the Ukraine where he compared the democratic activists who led the Maidan protests and were trained I think in Lithuania and Poland, when he sort of compared them to special forces operating in the country. And because in Putin's worldview in this highly charged geopolitical zero-sum world, democratic activists, NGOs, NATO, EU trade agreements, these are all instruments of influence that the West has. And the projection of one is necessarily the loss of another.

Vladimir Putin [archival]: [translated] Dear friends, for us today it is a very joyous, bright and festive day. After a long, hard and exhausting voyage, Crimea and Sebastopol are returning to their home port.

Keri Phillips: Russia's President Putin addressing the crowd in Red Square after the annexation of Crimea. With Russian troops now on Ukraine's eastern border and pro-Russian demonstrators active in Donetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, how far might Moscow be prepared to go?

Edward Walker: I think a great deal depends on how the next couple of months play out and whether or not Russia decides to send troops across the border into eastern Ukraine. My own view is if that happens it would be just a catastrophic disaster, it would be extremely violent I believe. But if that happens it's possible that the Russian military planners would charge their army essentially with moving as rapidly as possible across the southern and eastern parts of the Ukraine on a line from Kharkiv to Transnistria, to Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria. And this Russian protectorate in Transnistria, which is what it is, where there are Russian forces, so-called peacekeeping forces, are in place there, the local government there has recently requested that Russia annex it just the same way it annexed Crimea, and the Russian legislature has passed a law that basically means that if the Russian government legally wants to do that it can do it very easily under Russian law.

So anyway, there's a chance…there's not insignificant risk that Russia will invade. If they go into eastern Ukraine it's very unclear what their military objective would be, how far they would go. It's quite possible that they would be charged with extending Russia's borders in effect all the way to Transnistria. And then of course Georgia is also vulnerable. It was attacked in 2008, and particularly if Georgia starts to move towards NATO accession, the Russians will do what they need to do to stop that.

Keri Phillips: Edward Walker, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California. The other people you heard on Rear Vision today were Alexander Cooley, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and Lilia Shevtsova, the chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

If you want to hear this program again, you'll find it and an interactive map on our website: abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision, or just Google 'Rear Vision'.

Phil McKellar is the sound engineer for today's program. Thanks for listening. Bye from Keri Phillips.

Guests

Lilia Shevtsova

Chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions ProgramCarnegie Moscow Center

Alexander Cooley

Professor of Political Science Barnard College New YorkAuthor of Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia

Edward Walker

Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Political ScienceUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeleyAuthor of Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union

Credits

Presenter

Keri Phillips

Producer

Keri Phillips

Comments (2)

Rodney Wetherell :

13 Apr 2014 12:53:59pm

Thanks for a very interesting program on Georgia and all the 'stans'. Comments on Azerbijan were depressing - is that what oil money inevitably does to an economy? (we heard about Venezuela only last week). These stans are always confusing, but this program gave us little excuse for mixing them up.